Capsules of moments past
- For Ieva, bookbinding is a way of paying tribute to a book's contents
- She calls herself a 'thing-ologist'
- Her work is a collision of exploration and making
Since 2011, Ieva Rusteikaitė has been restoring old documents at Vilnius University Library and creating art books in her studio Siberiana Books in parallel. She studied Cultural History, Anthropology, and Semiotics at Vilnius University, then Conservation and Restoration at the University of Barcelona, and now she is a member of the Vilnius Bookbinders Guild. Ieva describes herself as a practitioner of 'thing-ology' – a kind of anthropology of objects, characterised by a close look at new, worn or even decayed surfaces, parts, and materials. In her bookbinding work, she fuses these together during the process of creation, to harbour all the traces of habits and everyday movements that were within the different parts. The result is a book that is both new and restored, encompassing many dimensions of content and form.
INTERVIEW
As a Cultural History and Anthropology graduate, document restoration seemed to me a fascinating craft, an opportunity to get in direct contact with historical sources. I turned to bookbinding because I wanted to understand how handmade books were made.
I am very interested in how older forms can be combined with contemporary ones. That tradition feeds the imagination tremendously because many people have no idea how much imagination and strange solutions there are in historical bookbinding.
As a voracious reader, I believe that the content is the main character. Bookbinding is, after all, an applied art, a fine craft, and it is applied to the text. I like it very much, and I take it as a challenge to create a setting for the book's content. Poetry is incredibly suited to this art.
Whichever way you look at it, in Lithuania, yes, it is very rare. In Europe, it is disappearing more slowly. The history of bookbinding in Lithuania is rather ambiguous. We know the famous bookbinder Tadas Lomsargis, but after him, everything stopped due to wars and occupations. It is hard even to be sure whether it is disappearing, or making a come back because it was already gone!
